Seaside Heights and Ortley Beach

After finishing work on the bridge, the guys moved onto the barrier island. They spent several days in the Seaside Heights area, then moved north to Ortley Beach.

One of the texts he sent me was “the damage is unreal, never seen anything like it.” Here he is under what used to be the boardwalk:

There is sand everywhere and it’s littered with debris.

Another view of the destruction:

Today was the first day that residents had been allowed back into Ortley Beach to survey the damage to their homes. The guys had some downtime waiting to move equipment to the next location, when they noticed a couple struggling to removed water-soaked carpeting and furniture from their condo. Not one to sit around when there is work to be done, Rudy said “lets go help them”. Not only did they help that couple, but they removed stuff from all 6 of the units in that building. The residents were very appreciative and tried to give them money, the contents of a liquor cabinet, etc., but of course they said no.

There was another couple who’s home was destroyed. Rudy had heard the woman crying earlier, obviously upset over the state of her home, yet she came over and offered the guys bottled water. She told him she had lived there since she was a teenager, and now she no longer had a home. Here I am 1500 miles away and I was getting choked up just hearing him tell me the stories.

Something I hadn’t thought about – after 2 weeks of homes being water-logged and no electricity to run refrigerators and keep food from spoiling, Rudy said the smell was getting really bad. And many people were wearing masks since mold growth could cause health problems.

I found a video made by a resident of Ortley Beach. I want Rudy to watch it when he gets home to see if he recognizes anything.

Setting Poles and Stringing Wire

The guys have been working on poles along the Rte. 37 bridge that connects the barrier island with the mainland.

They leave their hotel about 5:45 most mornings, and return about 7:30-8:00 pm. Maybe eat some supper….shower….sleep…….and get up to do it all over again the next day.

Finally Getting Down to Work

So I found out that the ‘man camp’ was set up as a staging & hospitality site for the utility workers, but will now be used as shelter for displaced area residents:

Tent City at Racetrack Now Housing Evacuees from Toms River

Unfortunately, it sounds like the conditions there are less than ideal:

Bitter cold inside a disaster shelter

When I spoke to Rudy Weds. night, he was sitting in the lobby of his hotel, and he said it was non-stop linemen/electricians/other workers, checking in from all over the country. He heard they had reserved around 150 rooms in that hotel alone.

The winter storm dumped about 10″ of snow where Rudy is working. Their equipment will be housed in Toms River, but they will be working on the barrier island east of there. If you saw the photos of the mangled roller coaster sitting in the ocean, that is Seaside Heights. He worked in that area on Thurs.

Many of the people who live on the island have not been able to return yet to see the damage to their homes. They are starting to bus them in for a few hours to retrieve important personal items.

Here is a really interesting website with interactive aerial photos of before and after Sandy of various places on the New York & New Jersey coastlines. If you drag your mouse from right to left over the photo you will see the changes:

Huffington Post Photos

It might take a while for the images on the site to load, but I thought it was worth the wait.

All the Comforts of Home?

This morning they returned to the ‘man camp’.

The “Man Camp”

It had all the comforts of home – a gourmet kitchen:

Fine dining room:

And custom laundry service – would you like light or heavy starch?

Rudy didn’t get a photo of where they would sleep. Which is just as well, because about then I’m wondering what I encouraged him to get himself into? It looks like something out of the old M*A*S*H* TV show. I can’t imagine him having to work 16 hours a day, in the cold and rain, and then THIS is where he gets to spend his down time? What kind of rest & rejuvenation can he get in an open air, leaky tent??

Fortunately, they found out their ‘home base’ was going to be further south in NJ, in the town of Tom’s River. So they spent the day moving all of their equipment down to the staging area there. And then the good news, they have motel rooms reserved in AC (Atlantic City) for the next few weeks! Yea! A real bed, heat, and a hot shower every night.!! This is what the drive south looked like:

Hopefully when the weather clears tomorrow they can get started working and help restore power to all those poor people who are still without electricity for almost 10 days now.

Detour – Atlantic City

The man camp wasn’t fully set up yesterday, so the crew spent the night at a hotel in Atlantic City. After driving 1500 miles across country, they had to drive another hour or two to have a place for the night – but of course there are no hotel rooms any closer. This morning they had a chance to see some of the damage near their hotel before heading north again:

A temporary fence was erected to keep people off damaged sections of the beach.

Sand carried in by the storm tide probably had covered this entire street.

Water-soaked belongings are stacked in piles waiting to be hauled away.

Not sure what happened to this truck, but glad it wasn’t one of ours!

It had started raining again, as Winter Storm Athena was moving into the area. Just what this area does NOT need….

Trouble Man

I always knew Rudy could be trouble :-), but I didn’t know someone had written a song about him and his brethren.

Just found this video of a song called “Trouble Man” – a tribute to lineworkers. The songwriter, a woman from PA, wrote the song after Hurricane Irene last year, but didn’t make it into a video until Superstorm Sandy.

The convoy got to Harrisburg PA Mon. night. The parking lot of the motel was filled with the rigs of other workers also headed to help out with storm recovery. Rudy saw linemen from AZ and MT that he’s met at training or other jobs. A forestry crew from Seeley Lake MT (which is where his good friend used to live and where we went to get married). Some of the guys had been on other big storm jobs like this before, and made suggestions of supplies the guys might want to pick up before they left town. Like flip flops for the showers, so you don’t get plantar’s warts or athelete’s foot. Extra food since they still don’t know what the living conditions will be. So they went shopping before getting some rest for the night.

This morning, Rudy texted me that they would be staying in Harrisburg one more night until all the arrangements had been made for their arrival. An hour later, they had new orders. They were leaving today, heading for Oceanport NJ. On the map below, the top marker is Hoboken, where they originally were told they were going. The bottom marker is Oceanport. See where it says Tom’s River down near the bottom? My mom lives about 10 miles west of there.

They met up with 5 more guys from the Fargo, ND crew, so now their caravan is up to 15 rigs. We’ve heard there is a large encampment of utility workers at the Monmouth Park Racetrack, which is near Oceanport. Perhaps this will be Rudy’s home for the near future? I found a blog today with photos from the racetrack. Many of them are of the horses/stables, but if you scroll down you will see the staging area and tents.

http://thetdnblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/in-photos-monmouth-park-stands-strong.html

Rudy called me at 3:30 EST – they had arrived! Here is satellite view of the racetrack, courtesy of Google Maps. Rudy said he is in the south parking lot, which is full of trucks and equipment, and he can see the tents set up more to the northwest in another parking lot. Their foreman went to find out where they are supposed to ‘check into their rooms’. I told Rudy not to expect room service in this ‘hotel’!

Convoy

They made it as far as Altoona IA Sat. night. Four more crews were meeting them there from other parts of SD. There are 10 vehicles traveling together in a convoy – line trucks, cranes, bucket trucks, a bobcat (that’s on a trailer – I’d hate to drive a Bobcat that far!!) and I’m not sure what else – those were the ones I could make out in the photos that Rudy sent me Sun. morning just before they hit the road again:

They spent Sun. night in Reynoldsburg OH. I think they drove about 650 miles. Here they are fueling up again this morning in Reynoldsburg:

Plans seem to change minute by minute. I can’t imagine the amount of coordination it takes to get all the people and equipment and supplies in the right places at the right time. Today they are heading to Harrisburg PA, which is apparently a staging area until they are needed in NJ. They’re not sure if they will spend some time there, or continue on to NJ tonight. There is talk that they may be housed in a racetrack or soccer stadium that has 4000 beds set up – a ‘man camp’ Rudy calls it. Time will tell……

Why Doesn’t Someone Just Flip the Switch Already???

Have you ever thought about where your electricity comes from? It’s so easy to walk into a room, flip a switch, and expect there to be light, or turn on your sewing machine and step on the pedal for those stitches to magically come flying out from under the presser foot. How many other wonderous things do we take for granted every day???

While I am far from an expert, or even particularly knowledgeable, on our electricity system, I have picked up a few things after being married to a lineman for 18 years. And after reading so many post-Sandy posts on Facebook and Twitter about “why does the block next to me have power and I don’t?”, I thought maybe this layman (lay-woman??) could help explain.

First the electricity needs to be ‘made’ somewhere. I really don’t know how all that works, except that it is the ‘generation‘ stage of the process, and usually involves a coal-fired plant, nuclear plant, or hydroelectric (dam). Oh, and wind power, one of the newer ways.

Now you have to transfer that electricity through power lines. Often it has to travel many miles before it gets to it’s final destination (i.e. your house.) Because it can lose energy as it travels, the electricity first goes through a transformer to make it powerful enough to travel those long distances, and then travels through high-voltage transmission lines. These are usually the large metal structures you see in between towns, not the wooden poles usually found near homes. (DH works in electric transmission, so he works on these high voltage lines.)

High-voltage transmission lines

Once it gets closer to your town, the voltage has to be lowered to be useable in your house. This occurs at a substation, which has tranformers and circuit breakers and switches and many other parts.

Now the power coming out of the substation travels on distribution lines, many of which may leave one substation to travel to different customers. And eventually it ends up entering your home.

Electricity Grid.
Click on the illustration to go to a Wikipedia page that explains in more detail.

So as you can see, there are many parts that are all interconnected. When my mom & brother were out of power, he kept complaining to me that there was only one power pole down in their neighborhood, so why didn’t they just fix that and get his power back on? Or people were complaining on Twitter that they weren’t seeing any utility workers in their neighborhood, so apparently no one was really working on fixing the power issues.

Perhaps the explanation above will help some to understand that until the generating station, transmission lines and substations are all up and running, fixing that one line outside your house isn’t going to help. And since there are different lines coming from a substation, it is possible for one block to be on and the next to be dark if there is a problem on one distribution line and not the others. There isn’t just one big switch somewhere that they flip and it magically turns on all of the power to everyone all at once.

There are also different type of linemen. Some work on transmission lines, some work on distribution lines, some work on the substations and transformers. And the line work has to be carefully choreographed. You don’t want someone switching on the power to a substation if the substation workers are not yet finished with their repairs. So when you see utility workers sitting in their vehicles, they may be waiting until they get the ‘all clear’ to proceed with the next part of their work. Or waiting for a different piece of equipment or necessary part to be delivered.

Thank you to the many people who have offered words of support to my DH as he embarks upon his journey. I know he and his co-workers want to restore power as quickly as possible to everyone affected, but they also want to come safely home to their families. So next time you turn on that light switch, be thankful that there are people out there who know how to make all this electrical hocus-pocus work. Hug a utility worker today!!!!

And Now for Something Completely Different….

So I’ve been absent from the Blogosphere for a LONG time. I’ve sold out most of my retail goods, have gotten caught up on the quilting, and am feeling much more relaxed and happy – yea me!!

And then came Superstorm Sandy. While I no longer live on the East Coast, I grew up on Long Island and still have friends and family in both NY & NJ. I spent the first week glued to the TV and reports on the Internet. All of the family I checked with fortunately had no flooding or damage, but were without electricity for varying amounts of time. My 90 year old mother went 3 days without, but fortunately was then restored. A cousin and several friends are still in the dark 5 days after the storm.

The total destruction done to some of the areas is unimaginable to me. My brother works in facilities management in Manhattan, and said of all the blizzards, 9/11, and other disasters that he has been through, this is the worst. If I didn’t have my shop and two dogs to consider, I think I would head out there and volunteer at one of the shelters.

My DH is a lineman for the power company in SD. Thursday he told me that they requested manpower to go out and help. It might mean he would be gone for 2 – 4 weeks. He had vacation planned – every fall for 20+ years he has gone deer hunting with friends in the Black Hills. But he was willing to go if it was okay with me. I told him the decision was his, but I was behind him if he wanted to go. So he started unpacking the hunting gear (he was scheduled to leave Fri. morning) and started packing the work suitcases.

The first report was that he and a co-worker would be leaving Monday and driving to Ellsworth Airforce Base where they would fly them and their equipment out in a military cargo plane. Cool! I’d like to do that too!! After several changes in plans, we were told they were going to Hoboken, NJ, driving a crane and a line truck. And leaving Sat. afternoon! All the things he was going to spend the weekend doing had to get done Friday night! Bills paid, laundry done, suitcases packed, and wait…….we don’t know if there is a place for them to sleep or eat. Hoboken was seriously flooded, and many stores and business are not open. So, time to pack a sleeping bag, pillow, wet wipes in case there are no showers, non-perishable food to keep his energy up during the 16 hour work days, bottled water, and, just in case, toilet paper! You never know what you might need when you’re a lineman on a storm job!!

So here is the rig he will be driving 1500 miles from the prairies of SD to the metropolitan New York/New Jersey area:

I’m glad I don’t have to drive that thing!

Time to go for tonight, but I plan to post more about his trip, as he will try to send me photos of his journey